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Teleport trouble

Published 13 December 2006

From
Bill Appel

The philosopher Derek Parfit asks us to consider our body being scanned destructively and reconstituted at a remote location (18 November, p 56). Paul Broks cites this to point up a distinction between the “ego theory” by which destructive transmission of a human being somehow loses something identifiable in this process on the one hand, and the “bundle theory” in which that something is not recognised as lost because, however strongly it may be institutionalised or intuited, it is deemed not to exist.

This thought experiment, however, misses a point beautifully made by James Patrick Kelly in his short …